I have a number of introductions to make today. First of all, I would like to introduce Raj Dam and his immediate and extended family, who are from my riding of Guelph. He’s also the associate director at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Welcome to Queen’s Park.

Dewitt, welcome to the Legislature today.

It’s an honour to rise today to participate in the debate on budget Bill 2.

Speaker, budgets are about priorities. They define who we are and who we want to be. And yes, I want to build in Ontario, but we have to build in a way that is strategic, sustainable and responsible, and this budget fails to meet the moment that we’re in, in achieving those criteria.

I’m going to focus in my limited time on three critical areas. The first is health care. The government talks a lot about building hospitals and long-term-care homes. Yes, I want those. Yes, we need a new hospital in Guelph and in many other communities. The bottom line is: If you don’t invest in the people who are going to run those hospitals and care for the patients who access those hospitals, they will not provide the care we need.

I wanted to see a budget—I believe the people of Ontario wanted to see a budget—that repealed Bill 124 and said nurses and front-line health care heroes can negotiate fair wages, fair benefits and better working conditions, that we could have fast-tracked internationally trained health care providers to address the chronic health human resource crisis we’re facing across our health care system. We could have invested in the 28,000 young people who are on a mental health wait-list right now that averages 18 months. Imagine: Imagine not being able to access care for your child for 18 months.

Secondly, investing in people is also about addressing poverty and housing in ways that take pressure off our health care system. We are forcing people in this province to live in legislated poverty if they’re on social assistance. Doubling social assistance rates would be the right thing to do, to bring them up at least to the poverty line, and it would help save Ontario $33 billion a year, which is what poverty costs this province.

Finally, Speaker, the biggest crisis of our generation is the climate emergency, and I don’t understand how a government, in the face of the fires we see, the flooding we see—the fact that just in the month of May, when we had an election campaign, we had people in northwestern Ontario being evacuated from their communities because of flooding. We had a storm that hit eastern Ontario which forced people to go two weeks without power, and we were already having extreme heat days.

As a matter of fact, a report just came out two days ago saying that the climate crisis is going to cost us, from an infrastructure standpoint, $139 billion over the next two decades. And yet, this budget proposes to spend $25 billion paving over the farmland that feeds us, the wetlands that protect us from flooding—protect us from flooding at no cost. We simply cannot afford in this province to continue to pave over the farmland that feeds us and the nature that protects us, if we have any hope of mitigating the costs of the climate crisis and leaving a livable, sustainable future for our children and grandchildren. That’s why I will be voting against this budget.